... they have achieved the status of icons within the subculture of what passes for the New Left. Icon Ellsberg became a celebrity in 1971 after he leaked The Pentagon Papers, an 'act of conscience' that helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War. This 'act of conscience' also, albeit accidentally, contributed to the demise of President Richard Nixon, whose felonious minions had allowed CIA officer E. Howard Hunt and erstwhile FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy to burglarize confidential files from Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, in a slap-happy attempt to discredit the anti-War movement by showing that Ellsberg was mentally deranged. Icon McCoy became a celebrity in 1972 with the publication of his pioneering book, The Politics ...

... the outcome. French predictions of the result were relayed to us hours before the count was over- which raised eyebrows on this side of the Channel. How could they know? ..... "They found Cook County", was the jaundiced comment of one observer, recalling the infamous result that gave Kennedy his victory over Nixon in the 1960 Presidential race.' Another dumb Clinton On the Fortean Times Website (1) there is the content of two articles from the Fortean Times, conversations between some of the US's leading purveyors and students of conspiracy theories. Mark Pilkington of FT introduces the conversation with the comment that 'Adrift amongst seas of information and disinformation, ...

... 19335/art-1.html An intelligence history of the last years of the Soviet Empire, giving a US perspective on the rapidly developing events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during this time, plus an extensive online volume of intelligence documents created during the Soviet collapse. History and Politics Out Loud http://www.hpol.org/ Includes links to selected Nixon Watergate tapes and transcripts. HPOL (History and Politics Out Loud- is funded by National Endowment for the Humanities, in partnership with Michigan State University) is a searchable archive of 'politically significant audio materials for scholars, teachers and students'. This collection, which will increase, includes recordings and transcripts of Lyndon Johnson, JFK, ...

... The Times on 13 September 1999 to no less than Brian Crozier.(1) Crozier told us, inter alia: For decades, I was one of the very few (sic) who tried to alert public opinion and successive governments to the Soviet threat.... in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon, the CIA was virtually paralysed in the most important domain: countering the spread of misinformation by the KGB. When President Jimmy Carter, who succeeded Nixon, appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA fired some 400 Soviet experts, on the spurious ground that they were no longer needed. The relevant CIA department, known as Covert Action ...

... an imminent alien invasion of Earth. The Communist bloc took a dim view of this, considering (correctly in the case of Puharich) that they were CIA agents and expelling them. Seifer does not dwell on these aspects, concluding instead with a review of developments in the Tesla area since the '80s. After Watergate and the demise of Nixon, the US political and military establishment tried to distance itself from some of the wilder aspects of its activities during the Cold War. In 1975 President Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller(17) to investigate the CIA's abuses of human rights via MK-ULTRA and related activities. By the time Carter became President (1976) other areas were also subjected ...

... on 13 September to no less than Brian Crozier. Crozier told us, inter alia: For decades, I was one of the very few (sic) who tried to alert public opinion and successive governments to the Soviet threat, for which I was pilloried by the media...in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon, the CIA was virtually paralysed in the most important domain: countering the spread of misinformation by the KGB. When President Jimmy Carter, who succeeded Nixon, appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA fired some 400 Soviet experts, on the spurious ground that they were no longer needed. The relevant CIA department, known as Covert Action ...

... Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Yale University Press, London and Yale, 1999, £19.95 The Haunted Wood: Soviet espionage in America- the Stalin era Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev Random House, New York, 1999, $30.00 So now we know: most of what the the Republican right in the US, the Joe McCarthys and Nixons and Hoovers, were saying in the 1950s about the presence in the US of Soviet espionage networks was basically true. In 1943 the US Army began trying to decode the Soviet radio traffic in and out of America which they had been recording since 1939. Based on so-called one time pads (and these are explained at length in one ...

... academics today) takes parapolitics seriously:'...already in the second half of the 1970s, political violence must be considered to have been at least partly orchestrated from [Right wing] quarters (rather than discounted as a random phenomenon). In fact, one aspect of the Trilateral interregnum covering the period between the fall of Nixon and the Reagan-Bush era may have been that in the absence of a really effective hegemonic concept of control, violence was resorted to in order to enforce a consensus of fear. Although this must remain a hypothesis to be worked out later, the succession of high-level assassinations and engineered removals of top politicians (Willy Brandt in 1974, Gough ...

... problem. They note 'Council on Foreign Relation member Clinton's Whitehouse contains 300 or more Council on Foreign Relations members he appointed to the CIA, NSC, State Department, and other agencies.' The roundtable people/person interpret the near universal membership of the CFR among US elite managers to mean that the CFR is running the US. But Nixon was in the CFR at the same time as the Trilateral Commission- a CFR spin-off also extensively documented by the roundtable- was grooming Jimmy Carter.(1) In other words, near universal membership of the CFR does not preclude conflict within the US ruling elites. The paradox here is that CFR would look much more interesting if ...

... the adversary's camp.' Verrrryyy interesting. The notion of a Texas-based assassination conspiracy always made sense to me: many of the players involved in 'intelligence' skull-duggery and extreme right-wing politics were either Dallas residents (the Hunt brothers, the Murchisons, Charles P. Cabell) or recent visitors to the city (J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Madame Nhu). It doesn't take much brains to posit a Texas-based hit a la Farewell America, authored by the pseudonymous 'James Hepburn' and reputed to be the product of French intelligence. The Nation has a long history of slagging off conspiracy theorists: its liberal slant is that political assassinations only occur abroad, never at home ...